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why is Google & Yahoo’s share price slide good for web 2.0?

Reading about Google’s stock ‘crashing’ (according to the homepage of the SMH at lunchtime today) made me smile. And its not because I own neither Google nor Yahoo shares. To me, it seems to validate the idea that whatever you want to call this time that we’re travelling through now in technologyland is not a bubble. I was less into the stockmarket back in the nineties than I am now (hard to believe, I know), but I don’t remember corrections like this happening to the darlings of the NASDAQ. In fact, I don’t remember them even really having to report performance (although that was probably because no one was paying any attention). Its particularly reassuring because Google is being pounded for not delivering on what are, really, astoundngly high expectations.

An 82 per cent rise in net income and an 86 per cent lift in sales was not enough for investors and anaylsts who were expecting an even better earnings result to justify the company’s stellar share price.

Despite being generally buzzword adverse, I’m a fan of this concept of web 2.0 (which to me encompasses a whole range of different developments – technical, philosophical, design, audience size, lots of things – that are happening right now, and that really make me want to bounce out of bed and come to work, like I haven’t for a long time. I want to think of web 2.0 as being truly a generational shift, not just a passing fad. I’m hoping to be here to see 2.1, 2.2, and the rest.

Hopefully even 3.0 (to those who are arguing for the shift to 3.0 immediately, I think we just have to ignore all the silly stuff and spin and do what we can to educate and evangalise the attributes and benefits of this amorphous blob of 2.0)

That’s why the recent Google and Yahoo corrections make me smile. Despite the fact that there will always be a bunch of jackasses who think that they look clever by learning a few buzzwords and firing them off at every available opportunity, by and large this time we’re following the rules – economic, design, project management etc. that we know to be true. And that’s what got dumped in the bubble. So for now at least, as long as the stockmarket demands that technology companies deliver on the performances they promise – I’m happy.